Privacy and Trust

Privacy and Trust

Privacy is not a feature of Wick. It is the reason anyone would let it into the house.

Four promises

1. No camera ever shows the inside of this house to anyone. Ring is used at the front door only.
2. She can see everything the family can see, on her own television, and remove it with one button.
3. Nothing about health, money or relationships leaves the house without her permission. A written policy in the software enforces this, not a model.
4. Wick reports what was said and what happened, never what it thinks she felt.

Who sees what

Information	Resident	Family
Who is at the door right now	Yes	Only when she presses "Ask Sarah to look"
That someone came to the door	Yes	Yes
Live video from the door	Yes	Never
Any camera inside the house	Never captured	Never
Appointments	Yes	Summarised only
The household's rhythm	Yes	As narrative, never as raw logs
The weekly story	Yes, and she sees it first	Yes
Carer visits	Yes	Whether she confirmed them, never whether she disputed one
Whether her day has begun	Yes, and she can put it out	Lit or not, nothing more

Consent

• A membership starts pending. The only thing that makes it allowed is the resident's press on the Circle card on her own television. Every tool call checks again, so a removal counts on the very next question.
• Anything unusual is hers to tell. Wick notices when a day is unlike this household's usual, but it does not tell the family. It asks her, showing the exact sentence, and only the press on Tell makes it readable. A question still open and one she kept to herself look exactly like no difference at all, so keeping something never tells anyone there was something.
• A neighbour is asked two things and shown nothing. A neighbour can be asked to look at the door and to ring when asked, and that is all.

The Guardian

Every string the family reads passes through a deterministic content gate, the Guardian. It refuses health, money, relationships, location and verbatim speech for a family audience, whatever a household's policy says.

• It reads text with a hand-written lexicon. No model decides what is protected, because a model is what is being guarded against.
• A string it cannot read is not cleared. That includes look-alike letters and invisible characters. A household's own people are recognised in any script, so a Cyrillic or Chinese name is a name, not an unreadable sentence.
• What it holds back takes a shape that already happens, so that holding back tells the family nothing: the door's sentence is left out as if the vision model were unsure, a week is told from its counts, an answer it catches is not sent at all.
• Property tests run it through the real tool server, the family television's routes and the assistant.

It cannot catch what its lexicon does not list. "How was Tuesday at St Mary's?" passes. It stops Wick from being how a protected fact reaches the family by accident; it does not stop someone set on spelling one past it. That limit is written down in section 6.5 of the technical document.

Data

Question	Answer
Is anything heard in the house?	No. Her television has no microphone. A family member can speak a question into their own app; nothing is kept.
Is video stored?	Door pictures are deleted within a day by the storage itself. Live video is never recorded.
Who holds the Ring keys?	The cloud service, one secret per household. A stolen Fire TV Stick gets you nothing.
What if a family member is removed?	It takes effect on their next request.
What if she withdraws?	She stops Wick on her own television: What your family sees, then Stop Wick, then Yes, delete everything. Her home is closed at once and every record deleted. The family app then says plainly that she has stopped Wick.
Can the family take their data away?	Yes. They can download or delete their own data in the family app.

There is no real resident yet

The household in the demo is a demo home with simulated, marked history, and the doorbell's visitors are pictures of nobody real. Nobody's home was recorded to make this. Before any real household uses Wick, the plan is to explain in person what it captures and shares, get written consent, agree what is off limits, and make withdrawal unconditional. See Status and Honesty.